Artist Takes a Serious Stab at Haunted House Horrorgami

The Addam's Family mansion is the artist's second favorite abode of all time. The 1991 movie's set designer emailed Hagan-Guirey to say how much he liked the Horrorgami model, so Hagan-Guirey promptly popped one in the mail.

Before creating a kirigami model of the house, Hagan-Guirey went through The Addam's Family film frame by frame to map out a possible interior floor plan.

Early sketches of the Addam's family mansion.

Hagan-Guirey's isolated hotel from The Shining is both beautiful and terrifying.

Hagan-Guirey sketches the exterior of The Shining's haunted halls.

Lots of free-standing elements (and no glue permitted) makes this house from The Exorcist particularly challenging.

Hagan-Guirey finds his way around the Exorcist house by sketching out his designs beforehand.

Hagan-Guirey remade his Amityville Horror model after a bit of practice to add more window panes.

Hagan-Guirey's early sketches of The Amityville Horror house.

Hagan-Guirey cuts each design using an X-Acto knife, cutting mat, and metal ruler.

Marc Hagan-Guirey can often be heard screaming from his office. Chalk it up to early exposure to too many horror films as a kid. Steeped in diagrams and sketches and interiors of the genre’s most notorious haunted houses, Hagan-Guirey sits, blade in hand, above his victim — an ornery 8.5” by 11” sheet of paper.

The only real torture exacted is on himself. See, the digital-designer-turned-artist has taken his love of scary movies to paper. The result is series of 13 (apt, yes?) famously spooky abodes, each crafted from a single sheet of torturously precise cut and folded paper. Despite some fierce cries when his medium doesn’t yield, Hagan-Guirey couldn’t be happier; his line of “Horrorgami” will appear at London’s Gallery One-And-A-Half starting Nov. 1.

The spark for the project came while visiting a friend in Los Angeles. Hagan-Guirey had long been obsessed with Frank Lloyd Wright’s crumbling Ennis house in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood, so his friend figured out a way to get a tour. The house was on the market and the friend decided Hagan-Guirey would play the part of wealthy investor from abroad. But while Hagan-Guirey is from the UK, he was not in the market to buy a $15-million house. Nor did he know about the plan until they pulled up to the driveway.

“When I calmed down, it really was like a spiritual experience,” recalls Hagan-Guirey. “The way he used limestone mixed with concrete, when the sunlight comes in you get the gold glistening. I wanted to melt into the concrete. It was very humbling.”

When Hagan-Guirey considered how to best thank his friend, he wanted to do something tangible and similar to the Ennis house in its fragility. The life-long tinkerer landed on kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting. Hagan-Guirey used it to attempt a miniature version of the abode, sketching, bending, smoothing out, and slicing paper to transform it into a 3D representation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic creation.

The project was well received, so Hagan-Guirey decided to attempt his second favorite architectural marvel: the Addams Family mansion. Here appeared a common horror theme: the Mayan-inspired Ennis mansion had been the stage for the 1959 flick House on Haunted Hill (not to mention Blade Runner). “I started rewatching all the films, getting ahold of the floor plans,” says the designer. “That’s how I like to start with everything — immersing myself in that little world.” Without even knowing it, he had begun designing a series of horror movie sets, bringing both crafts and scary movies (two childhood passions) into what would become legitimate art pieces.

Over time, these haunted houses became more detailed and even creepier, in part because Hagan-Guirey was getting to know his material a little better. “Initially I used heavier paper because I thought, ‘that will be more sturdy.’ But heavier paper has more plies. When you fold the paper, that can split and fan out,” he explains.

Now he spends more money on his medium, preferring a thinner stock that’s 40 percent cotton and acid free. While it may be better for a perfect fold, the paper’s slight profile also means coaxing free-standing elements to attention — without any glue — making the process at times scream-worthy. “The paper will sag, it wont stand up, paper curls, it will crease, and fall back over,” says Hagan-Guirey. “In the Exorcist [house model], it was really important to have free standing elements like railings and lamp posts.” So he pulled a fence, shadowy figure, tree, and car up from the paper’s floor, each completely unhinged from any supports. What looks like dark shadows appear from where each has been X-Acto knifed free, accentuating the tiny set’s built-in spookiness. The effect, though, is hard to achieve. “As I progress, I try to avoid anything like that.”

It takes Hagan-Guirey about a week to take each haunted house from sketch to presentation. But between the idea and haunted miniature, there are maybe six or seven not-quite-right iterations. Overall, Hagan-Guirey’s 13 haunted mansions have taken him a year’s worth of slicing and folding and then trying it all again.

The result is a set of pieces as stunning as they are spooky. For our sake, it’s wonderful these horror-filled houses have found new life.